Hellbinder wrote on Oct 27, 2013, 18:38:"" at least Forza 5 has been confirmed to be running at 1080p/60fps""

uh no its not. its impossible. its being rendered at 720p and then being upscaled to 1080p resolution for display. The very thing that this article is bringing to light.

The point is all games on the xbone will have to be rendered at 720p.

Also, the Forza games are, by the standards of top-tier racing games, pretty butt-ugly. It took until Horizon where you finally had a game in the series that didn't have widespread aliasing, washed-out textures, and texture glitches, and then the gameplay was half-assed.

LurkerLito wrote on Oct 26, 2013, 20:28:The PS4's digital game sharing policy is decent. The only question I have though, is what if you can't deactivate a primary console due to hardware issue? If I didn't fix my YLOD PS3 myself, there would have been no way to deactivate the console if I wasn't willing to spend the money to send the console to Sony to fix. So what happens to my digital purchases in that case? Can I get Sony to deactivate it via a support call?

You can deactivate it by a support call as well, I did that myself in the past.

jimnms wrote on Oct 26, 2013, 18:46:I saw something similar on a forum post a while back. The only EA game I own on Steam is BFBC2. When I tried to activate it on Origin, it directed me to a website, which then gave me an error (it was months ago, so don't remember the details). I just tried it and it recognizes the key as BFBC2, but then says the key has already been redeemed.

Yeah, most of my EA games on Steam ported over to Origin just fine, although Mass Effect wouldn't. Additionally, a key for NFS ProStreet that I had from Direct2Drive (now Gamefly) wouldn't activate on Origin either. Newer stuff seems to work just fine, but older titles are somewhat sketchy on their success.

jdreyer wrote on Oct 26, 2013, 14:29:That's really strange about the censorship in the Japanese version of GTA. Japanese media is no stranger to both gratuitous nudity and explicit violence (Very NSFW example here. The fun starts at 0 seconds). TV, for example, is much more permissive about nudity especially, and only full frontal is explicitly banned.

Maybe they were shooting for some kind of rating more permissible to yung'uns?

I'd argue the value of console games on PC is simply that it reduces the demand of the consoles themselves - it's easier to be exclusively a PC gamer now than ever before, and with that locked-in audience comes a market that developers have to at least pay cursory attention to. Yes, a lot of console ports are pretty shoddy, unoptimized dross that insult the average person's intelligence (realizing the average person probably lacks intelligence of any substantial sort), but it doesn't change the fact that they go a long ways to making the consoles superfluous.

It's amazing what being incredibly smart about your business model and growth, despite losses, can do to keep a company thriving despite repeatedly spending more than it earns.

Basically it amounts to that Amazon loses money because they spend so much money beefing up their infrastructure and entering new markets. If they ever decided to stop doing that, they could be putting up decent-sized profits (~$400-700 million a quarter, possibly cracking a billion in Q4s), but their focus is to continually do more for the customers, which in turn drives revenue growth, which gives them more money to spend on improving service. And Wall Street seems largely okay with this, mostly because a) they can get the profits whenever they want by scaling expansion back, and b) in some ways, AMZN's shareholders are getting their dividends through increased consumer surplus as customers of the company.

siapnar wrote on Oct 21, 2013, 21:54:Killzone looks pretty cool, but it looks like the same old gameplay.

GT6's graphics are really, really mundane.I never felt the GT games were a great depiction of real driving, either.Richard Burns Rally is the most realistic driving game I've played as far as I'm concerned

GT does pretty good with driving physics - it's the whole racing thing they have problems with.

Suppa7 wrote on Oct 12, 2013, 15:45:They didn't 'leave' technically but there was a game drought between 2000 and 2006 as game dev costs and developer teams exploded in size. Let's not forget Halo was originally a PC game and became an xbox 1 exclusive. Companies like EPIC games completely abandoned the PC, compare Unreal 2004 to unreal 3, and then we just had endless gears. Think about this: Epics last best PC game was UT 2004. Bulletstorm was just gears of war style console trash - lets face this. The whole game was just one giant one-off and the game mechanics were totally fucking unfinished compared to older games like UT2004.

So for almost a decade we got severely underfunded half-baked mediocre games and ports mostly outside of first person shooters.

Supreme commander 1 could have been a real next gen RTS but because of the fuckups at THQ with Udraw (I believe it was called). They could no longer properly fund games like Darksiders/Supcom/etc. So they all ended up not being as great as they could have been. Darksiders 2 was just such a boring trash game and you can feel it with the whole MMO/WoW style layout and weird diablo RPG elements, while cool don't add anything to the actual fun of the game.

Darksiders 1 was really an action game not zelda, and DS2 tried to move in a more MMO direction (fucking idiotic morons the designers are). They don't know which genre Darksiders 1 truly belonged to. DS1 is basically a beat-em-up with swords, instead they try to turn it into pseudo combination of Wow and zelda, like the morons they are.

No offense, but you sound like the poster child of what's wrong with the PC gaming community.

Beamer wrote on Oct 9, 2013, 15:28:He was still wrong, the Cell was nowhere near as powerful as Sony repeatedly said it was (and, it appears, they actually thought it was), but it isn't as ludicrous as to have someone say a PC doesn't need a GPU. The Cell was totally different than anything Intel was doing and would be much more capable sans-GPU than anything Intel had.

The biggest issue that it had was simply that the gap between theoretical peak performance and typical peak operating performance was massive due to the architecture of the SPEs. Yes, the floating point performance was absolutely ludicrous, but it took quite a bit of optimization to get much beyond 20% of the theoretical peak, and it's possible that due to constraints of memory bandwidth you could never fully saturate the SPEs with instructions for more than a cycle or two. If they could have figured out how to keep the SPEs busy all the time, they would have had XB1-like floating point performance, but doing so would have required memory that only now is starting to become available in OEM channels (and is still quite expensive). Even still, floating point alone doesn't make for a good GPU, but it sure helps. (As a thought exercise you could probably have envisioned something like a 24-SPE Cell with the same GDDR5 that's going in the PS4 could have been a beastly system even today, but pretty much any programmer apart from the most dedicated CompSci boffin would simply go "screw this" at the prospect of coding for it.)

yuastnav wrote on Oct 5, 2013, 19:45:Pff, just rename it to Half Life Forever or something, say that you'll have to restart development because the engine you are currently using for that game is outdated and you want to make a new one and then, in about ten years, outsource that things to Gearbox (if they even still exist by then).